Biography

Connecting the dots of Big Data to sniff out violent extremists.

As an information systems researcher, Mihai Boicu knows that violent agents have plenty of places to hide in the tsunami of information flowing through digital communication channels. Intelligence analysts looking to halt the progression of violent extremism face a challenge of astonishing complexity in isolating potential threats. Boicu’s projects developed at the Learning Agents Center has made significant inroads into training intelligence officials in recognizing information patterns that indicate dangerous activity. Working with various US Department of Defense resources, Boicu has developed a novel web-based application, TIACRITIS, which helps agents practice and learn how to link evidence to hypothesis through abductive, deductive, and inductive reasoning to establish basic credentials of evidence. In doing so, analysts are better prepared to take action based on the data evidence’s relevance, believability and inferential force of weight. Boicu is the Associate Director of the Learning Agents Center, Co-director of the Laboratory for IT Entrepreneurship, and Co-director of the Personalized Learning in Applied Information Technology Laboratory. He engages with students in the IT 390 course, which teaches rapid development of scalable applications in a hands-on, team-focused environment.